Scott Alexander is wrong about slurs

I don't think Scott ever claims that changing the words we use for minority groups is a bad thing overall.

His post is not only about changing the words for minority groups, and he explicitly says that the sort of change he's talking about sometimes happens for excellent reasons (he gives the example of how "Jap" became offensive in the 1950s).

I wrote a lengthy reply, but I find that I also want to say something briefer.

The specific claims you made in the great-grandparent of this comment were that "this [sc. previously inoffensive words becoming taboo] has never actually happened in history" and that "Words become taboo because they are used offensively". And the specific thing I challenged you on is whether that is in fact why "black" became taboo.

(Of course on Scott's account the final stage of the process is "because they are used offensively". What you disagree with is whether that's how it starts.)

Your comment doesn't offer any evidence that the switch from "negro" to "black" happened because "negro" was being used offensively. I would be very interested in evidence that it did.

I don't think anyone is claiming that SC/KT invented the term "black"! (It goes back much much further than MLK in 1963. The earliest citation in the OED that's clearly basically the same usage as we have now is from 1667; there are others that might be basically the same usage as we have now from centuries before.)

But I think it's generally held that it was SC/KT's activism beginning in 1966 that led to the change from "negro" being the usual term and "black" being the usual term.

I agree that the relevant question is something like "which was used more for racism". More precisely, something like "for which was the (racist use) / (non-racist use) ratio higher", or maybe something harder to express that gives more weight to more severely racist uses. (Consider The Word Which Is Not Exactly "Negro"; that may actually have a rather low racist/nonracist ratio because of its use within black communities and its extreme taboo-ness outside, but when someone uses it for racism they're probably being more drastically racist than, say, someone who is slightly less inclined to hire black candidates[1].)

[1] I'm not, to be clear, saying that the less-drastic racism doesn't matter. It may well, in the aggregate, be more of a problem than the more-drastic racism, if there's enough more of it. When I say things like "more severe" I am referring to the severity of one particular instance.

Do you have communicable reasons for your guess that "black" was less often used in a racist way? I don't have strong opinions on that point myself.

It doesn't seem at all true that "black" was a label of endogenous origin. White people were using "black" to talk about black people at least as far back as the 17th century, and I don't see any reason to think that they got that usage by listening to how black people talked about one another.

Of course, once SC/KT persuaded a lot of people that they should use "black", it became a label of endogenous origin, not in the sense that the word originated among black people but in the sense that the push for its widespread use came from among black people. That's a reason for us to use it now, but not so much a reason why "black" was better than "negro" at the time. (I'm not very sure about this. Maybe it was. If so, we would have to say that if SC/KT had decided that "negro" was the better term and written things like "We must refuse to be called black, the colour of darkness and night and evil and ignorance, and wear proudly the name of Negro, for it alone refers to our whole race and nothing but", and a bunch of others had been persuaded, then "negro" would have been better than "black" because it was "of endogenous origin" in just the same way. In other words, any complaint along the lines of "So-and-so just arbitrarily decided that we should all use word A rather than word B, and that's not a good reason why word B should become unusable" is (provided so-and-so is from the group being referred to) necessarily invalid. I'm not sure how I feel about that idea.

I very much agree that if the word most commonly used to describe a group of people is widely used offensively[2], and that group wants to adopt a new term, then everyone else should[3] go along with that. (There will likely be a "slur cascade" of the type Scott describes at the tail end of the process, but I don't think that's any sort of problem; the trouble with "slur cascades" isn't that there's something specially evil about the process but that it can impose a change even when there isn't any other good reason for the change, which wouldn't be the case in this scenario.)

[2] Meaning that the word itself is used to insult/belittle/threaten/...; I don't think things are so clear-cut if the situation is just that the group is hated and this word is the one everyone uses to describe them, haters and non-haters alike. There could be some value in a new word to get away from the negative associations caused by the haters, but if the haters are still there and still hating then most likely all that will happen is that the new word gets the same associations as the old; maybe better first to do something about the haters and then to adopt a new word without the baggage.

[3] Aside for stupid cases where there's something specially unreasonable about the new term -- imagine SC/KT saying "Henceforth we shall be known as the Masters of the Universe". This sort of thing is hardly ever a real issue, of course.

I mostly agree with your reasons, except that I'm not so sure that "endogenous group labels seem to have incredible longevity"; I don't think we have that much data, and while "black" and "gay" have persisted pretty well there was a time when it seemed very possible that "African-American" (and obvious variants outside America) would take over, in which case "black" would surely have become offensive.

In any case, so far as I can tell no one is arguing that we should start calling black people "Negroes" again. That would be a terrible idea even if the process by which everyone switched from "Negro" to "black" had been a pure "slur cascade". I think the questions that actually matter are (1) how often do these "slur cascades" happen, (2) are the changes involved generally good or bad ones aside from the slur cascade, and (3) how should we respond?

It still isn't clear to me how slur-cascade-y the "Negro"->"black" switch was, but that switch is already done. But what about "blacklist" (allegedly perpetuates negative associations with "black"), "the poor" (allegedly dehumanizing), "Latin{a,o}" (allegedly more sexist than "Latinx"), "field work" (allegedly potentially distressing to people whose ancestors were enslaved and forced to work in fields), "master copy" (allegedly potentially distressing to people whose ancestors were enslaved and forced to work for masters), etc.? Scott proposes that when faced with such a word we (1) evaluate whether it's actually doing any harm -- as he agrees "Jap" was in the 1950s and doesn't think "field work" is now -- and then (2) if it seems harmless-in-itself, resist the cascade until say 70% of the way down.

You might want to add (1.5) also evaluate whether what's going on is that some group of people wants to be referred to differently, and then (2') generally don't resist in that case even if no harm is apparent, because (a) maybe there's harm you haven't noticed and (b) giving people what they want is usually good. I'd certainly be on board with that. (I suspect Scott would too.)

I guess a large part of our disagreement here is that you're framing Scott's post as being all about names for minority groups and I don't think it is. Some of the (real and hypothetical) examples he uses are about names for minority groups ("Jap", "negro/black", "Asian"); some aren't (some aren't even words -- he mentions slogans like "all lives matter", images like Confederate flags, actions like eating at Chick-Fil-A, etc.; but also labels like "fieldwork" and "the French" which aren't names of minority groups[4].)

[4] Well, I suppose technically the French are a minority group, in that most people are not French. But they aren't an identifiable group within a larger society who are frequently subject to discrimination and persecution on account of belonging to that group.